Audacity and elegy

The City with Horns. By Tamar Yoseloff. Salt Publishing; 80 pages; £9.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

WALT WHITMAN casts a long shadow over modern poetry. His work, delighting in slang, cityscapes and the exuberance of being in the middle of a crowd, created a peculiarly American form of epic verse, with long lines stretching—seemingly endlessly—across the page. But, just as the iconic image of him in a wide-brimmed hat and open shirt can appear ridiculously romantic now, so too has his work been successively embraced and ignored by modern writers.

And so when a British poet and academic, Mark Ford, takes Whitman's claim that “though unmarried I have had six children” as the starting point for this third collection of poetry, he demonstrates a literary awareness that may not immediately appeal to every reader. Indeed, in “Six Children” Mr Ford, a lecturer at University College London, seems intensely preoccupied not only with the grandfather of American verse, but also with the Mau Mau insurrection and the Münster Anabaptists. Such a wide scope is impressive, and Mr Ford's enthusiasm for more obscure factual details, such as the decline of the passenger pigeon, shines through. However, when a succession of his poems turn out to be adaptations or loose translations of Petronius, Sappho, Pliny the Elder and Boethius, you may find yourself hankering after an original voice—even one as extravagant as Whitman's.

There are certain exceptions to this rule. Born in Kenya in 1962, Mr Ford writes deftly about moving to the London suburb of Surbiton, where the only reminder of his past home was “Red, African dust spilled from the wheels of our toy trucks and cars.” His elegy for a fellow poet, Mick Imlah, shows a directness and clarity that is not always felt in his allusive poetry. These momentary glimpses into Mr Ford's life are tantalising, edging towards a striking poetic style. And yet when Mr Ford describes how “we hate/to be touched, however/gently, in a slow-moving crowd” we may not think only of the urban claustrophobia he speaks of but also of the experience of reading his poetry, peopled as it is with other poets, only some of whom it is pleasing to come into contact with.

It is a sensation that Tamar Yoseloff, American-born and now living in London, also writes of in her fifth collection, “The City with Horns”. Ms Yoseloff describes how in a London bus “we are too intimate in this folded space”, the edge-to-edge contact with a stranger's body momentarily disquieting. Like Mr Ford, Ms Yoseloff prefers the company of ghosts, taking the life of Jackson Pollock as the core of her book.

Over the course of 13 poems, Ms Yoseloff traces Pollock's explosive marriage to Lee Krasner, his death in a car crash aged 44, and the life of his mistress, Ruth Kligman, who survived the crash to be nicknamed “Death car girl”. Ms Yoseloff skilfully gives voice to such figures through subtle shifts of tone, revelling in a particular kind of American slang.

Using such a well-known life is an audacious move, and Ms Yoseloff rises to the challenge. But the rest of the poems in her collection fail to live up to this drama, too often relying, like Mr Ford, on literary precedent. Both these collections have moments of joy, but their flaws make you want to turn to the writers that overshadow them.